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November 08, 2017

Pay Attention to Details

The parson was spending the night at his son’s house. He was heading to the hospital early-thirty the next morning for some tests, measurements, poking, sticking, and all those other things he’d agreed to let the researchers do to prevent others in the future from being where he was.

As was his custom, he made himself comfortable on a little love seat, with a pillow behind his back, a glass of wine on the side table (His son had said, “Dad, have you ever thought you might drink to much?” To that the parson replied, “What? Do you think it will kill me?”), his son’s dog was cuddled up on the love seat with his head in the parson’s lap. And behind the parson, sitting on his usual stool, looking over the parson’s shoulder at the laptop screen was the parson’s number 4 grandson, Al, age 10.

As was the custom, when the parson came to spend the night before the hospital adventures, he and Al were binge watching old episodes of The Amazing Race. Al has a habit of identifying which contestants he doesn’t like in the first episode of each season. During the particular season they were watching, Al had identified a male contestant as his villain. He based it on the man’s disrespect for his wife, the way he yelled at her, the manner in which he put her down and blamed her whenever they did not come in first on that leg of the race.

In this particular episode, the villain in Al’s mind and his wife came to one of the tasks needed to be performed. They opened the envelope. It said that only one of them could complete the task and that person should be one that was good at details. The man immediately said, “I’ll do this one. I don’t think you could handle it.”

He opened the next page of the instructions and discovered he needed to run down into a little valley and identify details painted on the faces of the indigenous people. He immediately took off at a dead run down into the area where the indigenous people were. As he rounded a curve on his way down he looked back over his shoulder at his wife cheering him on. That was the point in which he ran smack dab into a pole.

Al, still looking at the laptop screen over the parson’s shoulder, said in a quiet voice, “Well, there’s a detail he missed.”

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